Justine Kurland, SCUMB Manifesto in La città che non c’è. A poster exhibition on via Marin Sanudo as a thread between Leporello and Risma bookstores. Curated by Chiara Capodici

SCUMB Manifesto (Society for cutting up men’s books) is Justine Kurland’s latest book, in which the author presents a series of collages made by cutting up and giving new form to some of the most iconic images from books by artists who have monopolized the canon of the world of photography.

SCUMB Manifesto is an homage to the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist, who called for an end to men and patriarchal power based on domination, exploitation and death in favor of a superior, all-female society.

Between humor and activism, critique and parody, levity and incisiveness, Justine Kurland questions the circus of social representations and relations, using a visual language that traces a matrilineage to Hannah Höch’s nonconformist collages and Pop Art reassemblages, with photomontages that highlight points of tension, friction and contradiction. Deconstruction is mixed with sarcasm and a spirit of openness, and the book itself becomes a means of liberation to reshape our visual and social imagery.

Through the reproduction of some of the volume’s most significant collages, we have created along Via Marin Sanudo a path that links Leporello and Risma, two small research bookstores founded by two women: an invitation to further activate a dialogue on issues and dynamics related to machismo and masculinist attitudes that still persist in the streets of our cities, a gesture to remind us that we love neither comments nor inappropriate looks, but also a way to reflect on the fact that not much has changed despite the gestures, the words, the many small and large revolutions that have taken place since long before when Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex reminded us that the world in which she lived, and in which we still live, is a masculine world, a world -let’s say- where it is often the man who holds the knife.

Justine Kurland’s kaleidoscopic collages lift the muddy bottom of seemingly crystal clear waters. The violent impulse becomes a transformative gesture, in an act of reappropriation the blade here does not become a symbol of a threat of aggression but becomes a tool of active and positive deconstruction.

Justine Kurland is an American photographer who has long documented America’s fringe communities, devoting special attention to women’s experience and highlighting a reality far removed from the American dream, in which utopia and dystopia intertwine and coexist rather than manifest as opposite polarities.

Justine Kurland generously allowed us to work on the material for her book without asking for anything in return, supporting us in what may seem like a small gesture at the local level, in a Rome that we hope is not about to become as fetid as it is every summer, where the immobility of a city is recognized by its own administrators, and past the ballets of institutional spaces the communicative and political possibility of art is found in simple neighborhood billboards.

La città che non c’è is a neighborhood festival where books meet the community.
From the pages of a book to the square, to recover the space of a lost sociality that even resists in the historic suburbs of an elusive and indefinable metropolis like Rome.

Piazza Perestrello is the space of a spontaneous aggregation that speaks the most disparate languages of the world, it is the theater of a festival that was born from a collective of women readers and is organized in collaboration with the independent bookstore Risma.

In this square that is not yet a square, in a neighborhood that is a landing place of ancient and contemporary migrations, where dialects and regional accents mingle with Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and South American languages, The City That Is Not There grafts aerial roots that find in literature sap and fertile ground going to meet the many cultural initiatives from below that the neighborhood has been nurturing for years.

Soon the whole program online, you can follow La città che non c’è here!

collages from SCUMB Manifesto, di Justine Kurland, MACK, 2022, courtesy Higher Pictures Generation Gallery